Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Xcalia has been acquired by DataDirect / Progress Software

This is public now:

DataDirect now has a very comprehensive offer for Data Access. At the Progress Software level this is even better (with the combination of the ESB, the RDBMS, the EII, the ODBMS and other components). I'm now the CTO of the Data Services strategy at DataDirect. I'd like to thank all our Xcalia employees, investors, partners and customers for that very nice story. I've been very proud during all these 8 years to contribute to JDO, JPA, SDO and DAS and opening the door to extended persistence and universal mapping. That is just a beginning.

Xcalia has been acquired by DataDirect / Progress Software

This is public now:

DataDirect now has a very comprehensive offer for Data Access. At the Progress Software level this is even better (with the combination of the ESB, the RDBMS, the EII, the ODBMS and other components). I'm now the CTO of the Data Services strategy at DataDirect. I'd like to thank all our Xcalia employees, investors, partners and customers for that very nice story. I've been very proud during all these 8 years to contribute to JDO, JPA, SDO and DAS and opening the door to extended persistence and universal mapping. That is just a beginning.

EclipseLink RI of JPA

Seen this article about Oracle's EclipseLink being the RI of JPA on TSS.

Difficult to track Oracle's strategy about persistence... What the hell, are the differences between TopLink, TopLink Essentials and EclipseLink?

Is EclipseLink available outside of Eclipse? Or is it the Eclipse equivalent of TopLink Essentials, the one embedded within GlassFish? Why Sun would push an Eclipse-based component as an RI of a JSR? Now Sun has its own competitive open source stack (Solaris, Java, NetBeans, GlassFish and MySQL) what will happen to their historically strong relationship with Oracle? What Oracle will do with Kodo and AquaLogic Data Service Platform? Will they drop them, try to merge them? These are important pending questions.

Why JPA is the only standard with so many "official" RIs (Kodo, Hibernate, Eclipse)?

Anyway, there are certainly some very positive points in that announcement:

  • Oracle is going on the open persistence way, you know the one not limited to RDBMS. That's the right way to go, initiated by Xcalia and Castor, and followed by JPOX.

  • To that extent, I'm curious to see how they envision the evolutions of JPA, which is, by design, tightly coupled with RDBMS until now.

  • The bridge between JPA and SDO seems very important to me. It seems to me this is also what SAP is pushing, and also IBM. BEA was not working in this direction until now (Kodo and ALDSP being fully seperated, except one experience which has been described in this blog), interesting to see how things will change in the coming months.


On all these points Xcalia has been a clear pioneer. It is nice to see big players following the same approach.

EclipseLink RI of JPA

Seen this article about Oracle's EclipseLink being the RI of JPA on TSS.

Difficult to track Oracle's strategy about persistence... What the hell, are the differences between TopLink, TopLink Essentials and EclipseLink?

Is EclipseLink available outside of Eclipse? Or is it the Eclipse equivalent of TopLink Essentials, the one embedded within GlassFish? Why Sun would push an Eclipse-based component as an RI of a JSR? Now Sun has its own competitive open source stack (Solaris, Java, NetBeans, GlassFish and MySQL) what will happen to their historically strong relationship with Oracle? What Oracle will do with Kodo and AquaLogic Data Service Platform? Will they drop them, try to merge them? These are important pending questions.

Why JPA is the only standard with so many "official" RIs (Kodo, Hibernate, Eclipse)?

Anyway, there are certainly some very positive points in that announcement:

  • Oracle is going on the open persistence way, you know the one not limited to RDBMS. That's the right way to go, initiated by Xcalia and Castor, and followed by JPOX.

  • To that extent, I'm curious to see how they envision the evolutions of JPA, which is, by design, tightly coupled with RDBMS until now.

  • The bridge between JPA and SDO seems very important to me. It seems to me this is also what SAP is pushing, and also IBM. BEA was not working in this direction until now (Kodo and ALDSP being fully seperated, except one experience which has been described in this blog), interesting to see how things will change in the coming months.


On all these points Xcalia has been a clear pioneer. It is nice to see big players following the same approach.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Persistence: State of the Union

Seen on InfoQ this panel on persistence:

InfoQ.com and ODBMS.org (Roberto V. Zicari) asked a group of leading persistence solution architects their views on the current state of the union in persistence in the Java community, published here: Java Object Persistence: State of the Union.

The panelists included:

  • Mike Keith: EJB co-spec lead, main architect of Oracle Toplink ORM

  • Ted Neward: Independent consultant, often blogging on ORM and persistence topics

  • Carl Rosenberger: lead architect of db4objects, open source embeddable object database

  • Craig Russell: Spec lead of Java Data Objects (JDO) JSR, architect of entity bean engine in Sun's appservers prior to Glassfish

Persistence: State of the Union

Seen on InfoQ this panel on persistence:

InfoQ.com and ODBMS.org (Roberto V. Zicari) asked a group of leading persistence solution architects their views on the current state of the union in persistence in the Java community, published here: Java Object Persistence: State of the Union.

The panelists included:

  • Mike Keith: EJB co-spec lead, main architect of Oracle Toplink ORM

  • Ted Neward: Independent consultant, often blogging on ORM and persistence topics

  • Carl Rosenberger: lead architect of db4objects, open source embeddable object database

  • Craig Russell: Spec lead of Java Data Objects (JDO) JSR, architect of entity bean engine in Sun's appservers prior to Glassfish

JPOX 1.2

JPOX is clearly going in the right direction with their new release:

  • Compliance with several persistence standards.

  • Emerging support for non relational data sources.


It has always been our vision at Xcalia. What we have on top of this, is full support for SOA, both as data sources (services oriented data sources, like Web services, mainframe transactions) and as published APIs (SDO).

Like it or not, persistence, integration and SOA are converging.

JPOX 1.2

JPOX is clearly going in the right direction with their new release:

  • Compliance with several persistence standards.

  • Emerging support for non relational data sources.


It has always been our vision at Xcalia. What we have on top of this, is full support for SOA, both as data sources (services oriented data sources, like Web services, mainframe transactions) and as published APIs (SDO).

Like it or not, persistence, integration and SOA are converging.